Both wheat and corn are grasses that are cultivated in ordinary farm soils, but rice is derived from a grass that is nearly always grown for part of its life in water. It is taller than wheat, but not so tall as corn, and its wild home is in the tropical parts of southeastern Asia. It is still grown there in greatest quantity, and in the Philippines, while only a small part of the world’s supply comes from the New World. There are perhaps more people that rely upon rice for food than upon wheat and corn combined. It still is the principal article of diet of the inhabitants of China, Japan, India, and dozens of smaller Old World regions, while its use as a vegetable in tropical America is practically universal. A considerable part of the starch manufactured in Europe still comes from rice, and in India the intoxicating beverage arrack is made from it. The Japanese saké, a sweetish intoxicating liquor, is also made from rice. Notwithstanding its wide use it is not as nutritious as wheat or corn, being much lower in proteins than either of them. More than 2800 years before Christ the Chinese cultivated rice, for at that time one of the emperors instituted a ceremony in which the grain plays the chief part. It has been grown on land useful to almost no other crops as it is usually subject to inundations. Some varieties, however, have been developed which will grow on uplands and these are grown even on terraced land both in China and the Philippines. It needs a heavy rainfall, however, and grows best in lands that are flooded. It is occasional dry seasons that produce the famines of India when the crop fails. The botanical name of rice is _Oryza sativa_, and it is known now as a wild plant in India and tropical Australia. Its introduction into Europe must have been long after wheat, for rice is not mentioned in the Bible, and was unknown in Italy before 1468, when it was first grown near Pisa. Rice paper, which some people think is made from this grain, comes from the pith of _Aralia papyrifera_, a tree of the rain forests of Formosa, related to our temperate region Hercules’-club. SUGAR In the chapter on what plants do with the material they take from the air and soil we found that sugar was one of the first fruits of that process. In at least two plants the overproduction of sugar is on such a great scale that our chief supplies of this substance now come from these two plants--the sugar cane, which is a tall grass, and the sugar beet. Hundreds of other plants produce surplus sugar, but for commercial purposes these two, and the sap of the sugar maple (_Acer saccharum_), are our chief sources of supply.